


the oceans near the shore

by ice_connoisseur



Series: it well may be [3]
Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2020-10-04 21:06:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20477465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: Nine things that did not shape Ziva David (and one she shaped for herself)





	the oceans near the shore

**Author's Note:**

> Scattered across various word documents I found several hundred meandering words on the evolution of Ziva and her place within the team. Most are threaded together by Somalia and the repercussions there of, a few are from sporadic episodes through the seasons, and the point of views change accordingly. 
> 
> I’ve cleaned them up and shaved them down and tied them all up together here because the central theme is and remains Ziva (and Somalia), whether as voice or subject. Most were written when I first watched season seven; the final part came out of the start of season eleven.

It’s alright, when she’s there. Ziva is so completely not Kate – pretty much the exact opposite of her in every way, they couldn’t have been more different. Kate left a hole, a Kate-shaped gap in their lives, and Ziva doesn’t fill it, she can’t, no matter how hard anyone tried she wouldn’t fit it, but she takes up the space around where Kate isn’t and makes the Kate-hole smaller, somehow, so that it’s still there but not quite so gaping. And in a world that is so full of reminders of all the places that Kate should be but isn’t, Ziva is a refreshing break. Someone wholly unconnected to their dead friend, someone with whom there are no memories to associate, off kilter moments when she should be there but isn't.

It’s when she’s not there that the problems start. Those very rare mornings when Ziva isn’t the first in, when the office is still half dark and it’s far too easy to forget that the desk isn’t Kate’s, not anymore. Talking to a witness outside their house, the jarring moment when you glance behind you and the figure in the distance is the wrong height, shape, hair the wrong colour. If Ziva’s not there, it’s all too easy to forget that Kate won’t be, isn’t going to walk in at any moment.

Sometimes, he think he’d have gone mad without her, the living, breathing reminder that things are different now. 

* * *

It’s a week or so after the case with Gibbs ex-wife that Tony walks into work one morning, sits at his desk, looks over to Ziva’s empty seat and realises from nowhere that at some point in the last couple of months she had reached the point that meant she had been working at NCIS for longer than Kate did. He could probably work out the exact date, if he wanted to – he can find the date that Kate first started, the date she died is forever ingrained in his memory, and the only hiccup would be in deciding Ziva’s official start date – theoretically the day Jenny assigned her to the team, but somehow it’s always felt like that first morning, when she’d caught him flirting with a ghost.

He shivers at the thought and forces it from his mind. They all deserve more time than this.

* * *

Stuck in a hole in the Somalian desert, Ziva David does not have regrets. She is prepared to die, because that is the only out left to her now and Officer Ziva David is always prepared. But she finds herself wishing, sometimes, in the darkness of her cell and the loneliness of her mind. Stupid, stray thoughts that can’t and won’t change anything yet plague her all the same. She wishes she had been with Tali when she died, wishes she had realised sooner how far Ari had fallen, wishes her father had been a shopkeeper or a teacher or a marine in the US navy.

She tries to wish she’d never even heard of NCIS, but such a blatant lie seems pointless.

Instead, she wishes her captor’s breath didn’t smell so inexplicably like Abby’s laughter, because Abby is all that is good and right in the world and she does not deserve to have any part of her found in this dark place.

She wishes she could have the chance to tell the scientist what a comfort it is, all the same.

She wishes she was back in autopsy with Ducky, safe with his knowledge and his stories, and she hopes, hopes as she doesn’t remember hoping for anything in a long time, that he understands and forgives her, that somewhere he is still pottering around telling tales to all who will listen, and that one of them starts _I once knew a young lady from Israel…_and it wouldn’t matter how it ended.

That will be a good way to live on, she thinks. The best of ways

* * *

Officer Heather Kincade is snarky and mouthy and _definitely_ hot. She has the air of one who is more than capable of looking after herself, a steely edge that seems to develop on most women working in law enforcement, and she’s evidently smart, quick, and, according to her records, a damn good shot.

What really shakes him is the niggling idea that _this could work._

Not straight away, of course not. There would be a touchy few cases, Abby would sulk, someone would slip up and call her Ziva at least once, but eventually they’d get used to her and she to them and she wouldn’t be new anymore, she’d be part of the team.

It’s confusing and complicated and he can’t really get his head round it. Kate died, and Kate was irreplaceable, and the team nearly fell apart but somehow instead grew stronger and closer, and then Ziva came, and she didn’t take Kate’s place but she did fill the absence, made it easier to muddle through those early Kateless days. And he remembers thinking, at the time, _huh, so maybe this isn’t the end of the world after all,_ and it hadn’t been.

It could happen again. He can see it unravelling before him. Cases and stakeouts and undercover ops with this new dark-haired, brilliant, dangerous woman, and she’d be drawn in and become one of them, part of their family, teasing McGee and befriending Abby and standing up to Gibbs, until one day, maybe in two years or four years or eight, she wouldn’t be there anymore. Another failure to be added to his ever-increasing list.

Ziva’s ghost leers at him in the darkness of the observation room.

Kate died, right in front of him, and some days he can still feel the warmth of her blood on his cheek. But Ziva…Ziva is missing and Ziva is maybe not coming back but Ziva is Ziva and he’s not ready to give up on her quite yet. 

* * *

“I nearly killed you,” she said, and it was the truth. When she’d seen them lying there, Tony and Michael and her bloodstained carpet between them, when she had realised what Tony had done, what he’d taken from her, her anger had been immediate and absolute. 

But something had stayed her hand.

She tries not to think about it, but during those long dark months in captivity there isn’t really the luxury of distracting her mind from unpleasant realisations. 

If she had come in to find Tony dead on the floor and Michael alive beside him she would not have hesitated.

It’s not that loves him more, or Michael less – those emotions are too complicated now, one of the few things in her life that she cannot categorise and explain. Love, no, she has no trust or faith in love; what little she had bled out on a basement floor four years before. But partnership, teamwork, _that_ she understands, knows as well as she knows anything.

It’s instinctual, her rule one. 

No one hurts her partner and gets away with it. _No one_. 

She’s just not quite sure when Tony started filling that role permanently. 

* * *

Ducky takes her back to his house, the night they arrive back from Somalia. He guides her in his gentle, sure way, from the car to the house, to a sofa where she sits in silence. She is tired, so very tired, but more than that; helpless, compliant, like a doll. Not even a glimmer of her usual fire, and it makes the old man ache inside.

He runs her a bath and helps her into it, neither of them concerned with modesty, and while she lies submerged in the bubbles he perches on the edge of the toilet and talks, endlessly, telling her every story he can think of to fill the silence, hoping desperately to generate a glimmer of interest.

He thinks her lip twitches, just slightly, when he gets to the end of the time he, Jenny and Jethro fled across the English channel, but maybe it’s just wishful thinking.

When they’ve been sitting there so long he is sure the water must be going cold, he gets to his feet and gently guides her back out of the tub, handing her the clothes Abby had acquired from somewhere earlier in the day. He leads her to the bedroom and settles her gently under the covers as he would a child, the room dimly lit only by the soft side-lamp.

Her eyes have been half-closed since they arrived; it doesn’t take long for them to drift shut completely, though she’s not quite asleep yet. In the silence of the bedroom, he lays one had on her forehead, gently stroking her hair away from her face and whispering stories of what she’d missed while she was away, cases and arguments and pranks. He tells her how much they missed her, how much better it would all have been if she was there too, how the news of her death had torn them apart and just how far they were willing to go to avenge her. He desperately needs her to see, to understand, just how loved she is, and he’s in the middle of trying to describe the exact expression on Abby’s face when Gibb’s voice had come over the crackly radio connection (“_Ziva’s alive, Duck, we got her,”) _before he realises that Ziva is asleep anyway.

He settles into the chair besides her bed, pulling out a book and pulling the small lamp closer. His watch to keep.

* * *

Standing in front of Gibbs’ desk, staring at him stare at her application, things suddenly seem a lot clearer than they have in a long time. She _understands_, now, with the weight of five years and countless cases and a strange assignment that somehow became her life pressing down on her, knows exactly what she wants for the first time in who knows how long.

She knows their histories, better than they think she does – she was in charge of preparing their dossiers for Ari, after all, all those years ago. Knows about their childhoods and their families and that C McGee got in tenth grade trig that he would probably die before admitting to.

Knows how they were picked, one by one, Ducky and Abby and Tony, Special Agent Caitlin Todd, McGee, each one of them carefully singled out and selected by the man they rally round.

But not her. By many other men for many other things she has been the first name they called, but never this, the most important of them all. Gibbs has taught her and scolded her and listened to her and torn the world apart to find her, but he has never chosen her, not in the way he did the others, and she doesn’t have the English to explain to him how important that is. 

* * *

Abby is delighted and McGee is supportive and Gibbs does that funny crinkly eye thing that means he’s secretly happy and hiding it, but of all of them, Tony is the only one who truly understands the significance of her decision to stay.

She was never meant to stay still, pinned to one job and one place. Her life was a geography lesson, time measured in countries and cities rather than weeks and months, and suddenly she’s got caught in an elastic band that won’t quite let her loose ever again, not matter how hard she stretches.

He knows the lessons she must learn, the trivial little pieces about consequences, not upsetting your neighbour today because they’ll still be your neighbour tomorrow, making friends, learning the shortcuts and the way to get the biggest slice from the diner waitress.

He knows how hard it can be, battling against something you’re not always sure you want but know you can never leave behind.

NCIS had the same effect on him too, after all.

* * *

It’s only after she’s arrived in Miami that she realises. Abby has sent her three texts and a voicemail during the two hour flight, which is excessive even for her, but of course…last time Ziva was alone like this, she nearly didn’t come back. 

They keep it up for the duration of her trip. Abby is the most obvious, but McGee checks in ever day or so, and Tony’s emails are incessant. Even Gibbs rings her – only three times, but that’s three times more than she was expecting.

It should feel suffocating, but instead it’s almost…comforting. 

Ray comments on it one evening – they’re walking back from a restaurant when a message comes in from Abby, and she apologetically answers it. 

“They like to keep in touch, don’t they, your friends?”

He sounds more amused than put out by the interruption, honestly curious.

“Abby…worries,” she tries to explain. “When we are not all there. A couple of summers ago I got into a bit of trouble on an assignment. It took them a while to find me.” 

Ray doesn’t press for details. They already know there are things they cannot push each other on. She tells herself this is why they are so well suited.

* * *

She understands her father better with distance, as is often the case. Understands his pains and his sufferings, the deceptions he has made to get where he is today, and the prices he has paid for them. She is even beginning to understand the depth of his regrets.

He is bound by his duty, to his agency and his country, above all else. It is a noble bond that ties him, the greater good in every sense, and he has sacrificed more than any man should to fight a war that has existed for millennia. Maybe she is wrong to draw parallels, maybe she shouldn’t equate the weight of a country to a small subsection of the US Federal System, but she does, because they are the only families she has known and the only ones she can look to.

Where Eli David could not and would not, Gibbs and Tony and McGee and Abby and Ducky could not but did anyway, because she was one of them before she was anything else. Before she was an Agent or an Officer, she was their Ziva, and they would tear the world apart again and again to see her safe and sound.

During her Mossad days she was always adamant that being Eli David’s daughter would warrant her no special treatment. She was the best because she was the best, because she had worked for it and slaved over it and bled for it, not because of the luck of her birth.

He had reacted to her disappearance as he would that of any other officer. That she was his daughter should not and did not make a difference.

But.

She was his _daughter_. And that _should_ have made a difference.

* * *

She arrives back in Washington on a drizzly day some twenty months after kissing Tony goodbye at a dusty Israeli airfield. No one pays her any mind as she collects her luggage, though the official at passport control offers her an absent-minded “welcome home” as he scans her documents, and that warms her more than two words have any right to. She is tired and grimy with air travel, but lighter too, demons so entrenched she hadn’t even realised the weight of them until they were at last laid to rest.

She spots them before they see her, of course. McGee looks vaguely uncomfortable holding up one half of a decorated banner Ziva is quietly certain was a morgue sheet in a previous life. At the other end Abby is literally bouncing with anticipation, whipping her head back and forth to scan the crowds so quickly she passes over Ziva twice. She smiles to herself, because she wants to and because she can, and heads towards the waiting pair. 

Later, after the hugs and the greetings and McGee’s awkward stumbling explanation that Tony is stuck upstate tailing a suspect so they’re to take her to dinner and then drop her at his apartment (and she can see that McGee is desperately not trying to draw any conclusions from that and it warms her inside, somehow, because Tony has been her secret for so long and now here it is, whatever it is, causing McGee’s ears to pink and Abby to cackle at his discomfort like there’s nothing secret or dangerous to worry about)…later, after a warm, laughter-filled dinner and a quick stop by the morgue to assure Ducky that yes, she is all in one piece, later, after she’s let herself into Tony’s apartment and helped herself to his bathtub and his frankly obscene amount of toiletries…later, she’s woken from her inadvertent nap by a key in the lock, footsteps in the hall, a warm weight settling down on the sofa besides her. 

The world is a very large place and she has seen much of it and finally, finally, she knows what parts of it she wants for her own; knows what she wants and accepts, realises, understands that she _can have, _for as long as they’ll have her in return.

The TV clicks on and the sound of Judy Garland quietly warbling fills the room. She rearranges herself slightly, getting comfortable, and if that results in her pushing closer into the warmth besides her, well. A raised eyebrow and a pointed smirk suggest her ploy did not go unnoticed, but everyone knows government agents are an overly suspicious bunch anyway.

They’ll need to talk, later, talk and plan and figure out where the hell things go from here. But she’s made it here– _they’ve_ made it here – and somehow later just doesn’t seem all that scary, after that.

_There’s no place like home. _


End file.
